Aztec

'You will survive the storm,' said Night Wind.

The Oldest went on, 'The gods have helped you to become a knower of words. Then they helped you to travel in many places and to see and learn and experience much. That is why, more than any other man, you know what The One World was like.'

'Was?' I echoed.

The Oldest made a sweeping gesture with his skinny arm. 'All this will disappear from sight and touch and every other human sense. It will exist only in memory. You have been charged with remembering.'

'You will endure,' said Night Wind.

The Oldest gripped my shoulder and said, with infinite melancholy, 'Someday, when all that was is gone... never to be seen again... men will sift the ashes of these lands, and they will wonder. You have the memories and the words to tell of The One World's magnificence, so it will not be forgotten. You, Mixtli! When all the other monuments of all these lands have fallen, when even the Great Pyramid falls, you will not.'

'You will stand,' said Night Wind.

I laughed again, scoffing at the absurd idea of the ponderous Great Pyramid ever falling down. Still trying to humor the two admonitory phantasms, I said, 'My lords, I am not made of stone. I am only a man, and a man is the frailest of monuments.'

But I heard no reply or reproof. The apparitions had gone as quickly as they had come, and I was talking to myself.

From some distance behind my bench, the street lamp flickered its moody blue flames. In that mournful lighting, the red tapachini blossoms that fluttered down onto me were dark, a crimson color, like a drizzle of drops of blood. I shuddered, for I felt a feeling I had experienced only once before—when for the first time I had stood at the edge of the night and the edge of the darkness—the feeling of being utterly alone in the world, and desolate, and forlorn. The place where I sat was only a tiny island of dim blue light, and all about that place there was nothing but darkness and emptiness and the low moaning of the night wind, and the wind moaned, 'Remember....'

* * *

When I was awakened by a street-lamp tender making his rounds at dawn, I laughed at my unbecomingly drunken behavior and my even more foolish dream. I limped back to the palace, stiff from having slept on the cold stone bench, expecting to find the whole court still asleep. But there was great excitement there, everyone up and dashing frantically about, and a number of armed Mexica soldiers inexplicably posted at the building's various portals. When I found Prince Willow and he glumly told me the news, I began to wonder if my nighttime encounter really had been a dream. For the news was that Motecuzoma had done a base and unheard-of thing.

As I have said, it was an inviolable tradition that solemn ceremonies like the funeral of a high ruler would not be marred by assassination or other such treacheries. As I have also said, the Acolhua army had been all but disbanded by the late Nezahualpili, and the token few troops still under arms were in no state of readiness to repel invaders. As I have also said, Motecuzoma had sent to the funeral his Snake Woman Tlacotzin and his army commander Cuitlahuac. But I have not said, because I did not know, that Cuitlahuac had brought with him a war acali carrying sixty hand-picked Mexica warriors, who he had secretly debarked outside Texcoco.

During that night, while in my drunken confusion I was conversing with my hallucinations or with myself, Cuitlahuac and his troops had routed the palace guards, had taken over the building, and the Snake Woman had summoned all its occupants to hear a proclamation. The Crown Prince Black Flower would not be crowned his father's successor. Motecuzoma, as chief ruler of The Triple Alliance, had decreed that the crown of Texcoco would go instead to the lesser prince Cacama, Maize Cob, the twenty-year-old son of one of Nezahualpili's concubines who, not incidentally, was Motecuzoma's youngest sister.

Such a display of duress was unprecedented, and it was reprehensible, but it was incontestable. However admirable Nezahualpili's pacificatory policy might have been in principle, it had left his people sadly unprepared to resist the Mexica's meddling in their affairs. Crown Prince Black Flower put up a furious show of black indignation, but that was all he could do. Commander Cuitlahuac was not a bad man, despite his being Motecuzoma's brother and his following Motecuzoma's orders. He expressed his condolences to the deposed prince, and advised him to go quietly away somewhere, before Motecuzoma should get the very practical notion of ordering him imprisoned or eliminated.

So Black Flower departed that same day, accompanied by his personal courtiers and servants and guards and quite a number of other nobles equally infuriated by the turn of events, all of them loudly vowing revenge for having been betrayed by their longtime ally. The rest of Texcoco could only seethe in impotent outrage, and prepare to witness the coronation of Motecuzoma's nephew as Cacamatzin, Uey-Tlatoani of the Acolhua.

I did not stay for that ceremony. I was a Mexicatl, and no Mexicatl was very popular in Texcoco right then, and indeed I was not very proud of being a Mexicatl. Even my old schoolmate Willow was eyeing me pensively, probably wondering if I had spoken a veiled threat when I told him, 'Motecuzoma will love your brother no better than he loved your father.' So I left there and returned to Tenochtitlan, where the priests were jubilantly arranging special rites in almost every temple to celebrate 'our Revered Speaker's clever stratagem.' And Cacamatzin's buttocks had barely warmed the Texcoco throne before he was announcing a reversal of his father's policy: calling a new muster of Acolhua troops to help his uncle Motecuzoma mount still another offensive against the eternally beleaguered nation of Texcala.

And that war too was unsuccessful, mainly because Motecuzoma's new and young and bellicose ally, though personally selected by him and related by blood to him, was not of much help to him. Cacama was neither loved nor feared by his subjects, and his call for volunteer soldiers went absolutely ignored. Even when he followed his call with a stern order of conscription, only a comparatively few men responded, and did so reluctantly, and proved remarkably listless in battle. Others of the Acolhua, who would otherwise eagerly have taken up arms, pleaded that they had grown old or ill during Nezahualpili's years of peace, or that they had fathered large families they could not leave. The truth was that they were still loyal to the Crown Prince who should have been their Revered Speaker.

On leaving Texcoco, Black Flower had removed to another of the royal family's country residences, somewhere in the mountains well to the northeast, and had begun making of it a fortified garrison. Besides the nobles and their families who had voluntarily gone into exile with him, many other Acolhua joined that company: knights and warriors who had formerly served under his father. Still other men, who could not permanently leave their homes or occupations in the domains of Cacama, did slip away at intervals to Black Flower's mountain redoubt, for training and practice with the other troops. All those facts were unknown to me at the time, as they were unknown to most people. It was a well-kept secret that Black Flower was preparing, slowly but carefully, to wrest his throne from the usurper, even if that should mean his having to fight the entire Triple Alliance.

Meanwhile, Motecuzoma's disposition, poisonous at the best of times, was not being improved. He suspected that he had fallen much in the esteem of other rulers by his domineering intervention in the affairs of Texcoco. He felt humiliated by his latest failure to humble Texcala. He was not much pleased with his nephew Cacama. Then, as if he had not enough to worry and annoy him, even more troublesome things began to occur.

Nezahualpili's death might almost have been the signal for the fulfillment of his gloomiest predictions. In the month of The Tree is Raised next following his funeral, a swift-messenger from the Maya lands arrived with the disturbing news that the strange white men had come again to Uluumil Kutz, and not two of them that time, but a hundred. They had come in three ships, and moored off the port town of Kimpech on the western shore of the peninsula, and rowed to the beach in their big canoes. The people of Kimpech, those who had survived the decimation of the small pocks, resignedly let them land without fuss or opposition. But the white men boldly entered a temple and, without even gestures of requesting permission, began to strip the temple of its golden ornamentation. At that, the local populace put up a fight.

Or they tried to, said the messenger, for the weapons of the Kimpech warriors shattered on the white men's metal bodies, and the white men shouted a war cry, 'Santiago!' and they fought back with the sticks they carried, which were not mere staves or clubs. The sticks spat thunder and lightning like the god Chak at his angriest, and many Maya fell dead at a great distance from the spitting sticks. Of course, we all know now that the messenger was trying to describe your soldiers' steel armor and far-killing harquebuses, but at the time his story sounded demented.

However, he brought two articles to substantiate his wild tale. One was a bark paper tally of the dead: more than a hundred of the Kimpech men, women, and children; forty and two of the outlanders—an indication that